WHY CAN’T I STOP EATING
Do you feel like you NEED to finish everything on your plate?
Do you feel like you are never satisfied until ALL the food is gone?
Do you feel like you need to eat everything in front of you as if it’s the last time you’ll enjoy tasty food?
If that’s you, then you may be operating from a place of scarcity. And that’s why you seemingly can’t stop eating past the point of feeling full despite following different diets, meal plans, or even trying to plan ahead.
This sort of things rings true for a lot of my clients who are working to lose weight and improve their relationship with food. Operating from a place of scarcity isn’t rare. It’s just unspoken. For most people, they don’t even know this about themselves. For some people, this can develop from childhood when their parents wouldn’t let them leave the dinner table until they finished all their food on their plate.
For one client of mine, she grew up without much access to food as a child, so when she used to get $0.25 to buy a bag of chips she would savor every bite because nobody knew when they’d be able to do that again. Unfortunately, this has led her to subconsciously behave the same way in adulthood despite having essentially infinite access to any food she could possibly want.
Once we uncovered that she was operating from a place of scarcity she felt pretty excited. Liberated even. Like a light bulb moment happened. It was then that we were able to work together to establish specific strategies to change this. Here’s a few of what we talked about:
During each meal, remind yourself that you are in control more than you think and you can choose to stop whenever you want.
Remind yourself that stopping eating without finishing the food on your plate doesn’t mean the food is “wasted”. Choosing to leave leftovers on the plate (or not) is not a moral decision.
When experiencing feelings of shame or guilt, remind yourself that these are self-imposed (even though these feelings could have been initially triggered by someone else when you were a child). Remember that you are not a bad person for stopping a meal earlier than usual.
You will never be perfect - especially when working through an opportunity like this. You have operated in a certain way around food for years or even decades, it would be unreasonable to expect yourself to be perfect right away (or ever at all). Look for progress and improvement - not the ever-elusive “perfection”.
This is another good example of how our beliefs, thoughts and ideas about ourselves and the world will directly influence how we treat our body with nourishment. And a lot of these beliefs are developed in childhood but remain subconscious or just too deep to identify easily. With some thoughtful questions, empathetic support and a willing attitude to make uncomfortable changes, anyone can overcome these challenges.
You aren’t failing to lose weight because you haven’t found the right solution. You’re failing because you haven’t found the right problem yet. If you misdiagnose the problem in the first place then all potential solutions are like forcing a square peg into a round hole. If I was trying to fix my roof with a curling iron then it would make sense to most people why I never saw any results.
Identify the right problems first, THEN you can find the solutions that start to make everything a whole lot easier.
If you need help finding the problems that are stopping you from achieving sustainable weight loss and maintaining a healthy and happy relationship with food without being on a diet forever, then send me a message by clicking here.
Thanks for reading and I hope this helped!
Tim
Follow me on Instagram: @iamtimwalcott
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